@Antilogic & Ajidica: I've nested your quotes here for ease of conversational flow, just in case you might be concerned that I've changed your words - I haven't.
It was the first one. I then read the original Dune, and got about 50-100 pages into the first sequel which I borrowed from a friend. However, I got bogged down with work and returned the book unfinished.
Dune Messiah (the sequel) is a strange book. At first I couldn't stand it; then I read it again later and it became one of my favorite Dune books.
I liked that it was short, to the point, and included some of my favorite lines from the book.
Dune Messiah is a logical follow up of the obvious question that happens at the end of
Dune: "Okay, he conquered the Harkonnens and beat Shaddam IV, and is about to marry the princess (literally). He's the Emperor. So now what?"
The Imperium is huge. Really huge.
Mind-bogglingly huge. And now Paul Atreides, who isn't even out of his teens, is the Emperor of all of it. He's got his Bene Gesserit mother, his pre-Born sister, a few Atreides retainers, and a planetful of fanatical Fremen whose loyalty to him is more to do with religion than to Imperial politics. The Fremen don't care about politics on other planets; they just want their time to be in charge, after all the millennia of being on the bottom of everything.
And of course the old regime isn't going to go away quietly. So
Dune Messiah is a story of political intrigue, in which all the various factions are scrambling for power in any way they can, and some think the obvious way is to kill Paul and his family, while others think it's better to control him. So you get the intrigue and plotting among the Bene Gesserit, the Guild, the smugglers, the remnants of the Corrino family, and the Tleilaxu, while various Fremen hatch plots of their own.
If you found the novel hard to get into, I recommend the TV miniseries (available on YouTube). It covers everything from
Dune through the end of
Children of Dune, and doesn't do crazy stuff like make it rain, or have the Fremen wearing black stillsuits in the desert, like the Lynch movie did.
Ajidica said:
Antilogic said:
Sounds like a bit of intrigue, and these guys are using the name for their own work without staying as true to the original vision. I'm always interested in seeing the design notes, especially the early stuff, to observe how the final product developed and especially how the creators decided on the plot twists. It's a bit sad this kind of material is hard to come by for some of the big series (like Dune).
You can find some of that stuff in
The Road to Dune; an anthology put out by BH/KJA that includes the first 'draft' of Dune and various other short stories/background info on the world by Frank Herbert. I haven't read it in years so I don't really remember what it is in.
The Road to Dune is interesting, and I remember getting flamed by other Orthodox Herbertarians because I dared to say that I liked parts of that book. Even though I'm one of the original members of that group, I'm not "orthodox" enough for the rest of them.
What counts as finished? I'd like to see more from Asimov or Pratchett, but both of them were going to keep writing until they died regardless of age.
Asimov did leave some manuscripts unfinished at the time of his death, and some of them were published posthumously after being completed either by his wife (J.O. Jeppson) or other authors.
I just found out recently that Leo Frankowski, who wrote a rather bizarre time travel series about a 20th century Polish engineer who accidentally gets transported back to the 13th century and tries to modernize it, died a few years ago. The final 2 or 3 books in this series were completed by another author, so I'll have to check them out. I'd thought that he'd just abandoned the series.
